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I feel like one of those news anchors who follows a bus crash story with a humorous segment on a waterskiing squirrel, but–in case you missed Stephen Colbert telling Elizabeth Alexander that he literally has a mountain in his pants:

Barack Obama: the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. Elizabeth Alexander: the fourth poet to read at a U.S. president’s inauguration. Graywolf Press will be releasing Alexander’s poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” as a chapbook on February 6. Which is good, because, in this humble scribe’s opinion, the poem works better on the [...]

The poetry beat is getting more and more seedy. From The Independent (“Chinese ‘classical poem’ was brothel ad,” by Clifford Coonan): There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of [...]

The poetry beat ain’t always pretty. From the Guardian (“Two new Burns poems discovered,” by Alison Flood): His love might have been like a red red rose, but it turns out that Robert Burns may also have been suffering from a rather nasty STD, according to a collection of explicit writing apparently by Scotland’s national [...]

Though I try to keep an eye on the poetry beat, my efforts are woefully inadequate. Today I’ll do better. In Donna Seaman’s review of Kevin Coval’s Everyday People in the December 1 issue of Booklist, it caught my eye when Donna noted that the white, Jewish, suburban-raised hip-hop poet’s works contain “beef jerky and sandalwood incense.” And if [...]

In the Toronto Star (“Canada Council denies conflict of interest“), Vit Wagner reports on the controversy that erupted following the announcement of one of the poetry winners in the Governor General’s Literary Awards. Jacob Scheier, a Canadian expatriate living in Brooklyn, won for his debut collection, More to Keep Us Warm. And here’s the rub: In [...]

In The Telegraph (“The young generation“), John Walsh offers the story behind the finally-published collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. You can read my review, but I’m inclined to agree with Walsh that it’s more “a fascinating snapshot from a lost era” than a lost literary masterpiece. You [...]

Hayden Carruth (Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, 1996), R.I.P. (“Hayden Carruth, Poet and Critic, Dies at 87,” by William Grimes, New York Times): “He had a greater variety of poems than almost anybody,” said the poet Galway Kinnell, a longtime friend. “He was interested — superinterested — in everything and he could write about anything.”  Clive [...]

Boy, I’ve had a hard time keeping up lately. In the New York Times Magazine (“Those Who Write, Teach“), David Gessner asks, “what, if anything, does it mean for a country to have a tenured literature? It’s fine for writing teachers to talk in self-help jargon about how their lives require “balance” and “shifting gears” between teaching [...]

Louise Gluck (Averno, 2006) has won the Wallace Stevens Award, and with it, 100,000 smackers. The announcement comes via the Associated Press. Although the award is administered by the Academy of American Poets, I visited their Web site just now and could find no mention of the news on the front page or even in the [...]